The Passenger and Stella Maris
By Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 2022

An anniversary addict, a fan of “it happened on this day,” would note that McCarthy’s long germinating novels The Passenger and Stella Maris were published exactly 100 years after “The Waste Land” and Ulysses. The connection isn’t entirely random. Eliot’s dedication to the poem—“il miglior fabbro,” the better craftsman—addresses Ezra Pound, is copped from Dante, and comes from the root that gives us “fabrication.” Of the three modernists, Joyce was the most ingenious fabricator, a word that has come to mean an assembler, usually of unlike things. The fabricator fastens together materials others have created—the process that describes the historical and literary assemblings that are “The Waste Land,” Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos, and McCarthy’s two joined books. And of course “fabricator” can also mean falsifier.

The Passenger has two quite different detective stories that begin with corpses. On the first page is the body of the young and beautiful Alicia Western who has left the Wisconsin asylum called Stella Maris and hanged herself in 1972. A few pages afterwards come the corpses that her brother Bobby, a salvage diver, finds some years later in a sunken plane off the coast of New Orleans where much of the novel is set in 1980. The mysteries to solve are why? and who? The title initially refers to a person who was supposed to be a corpse in the plane but somehow escaped or never made the flight. When Bobby investigates the disappearance, he finds himself investigated by, possibly, federal agents who want to keep the accident a secret. When Bobby doesn’t cooperate, they unleash the IRS on him—which sets the novel’s possibly paranoid plot in motion.

Forced to leave his apartment and then New Orleans, Bobby is like one of the lone and lonesome cowboys in McCarthy’s border trilogy, constantly on the move, running into and listening to others’ stories. As usual, McCarthy is excellent on the settings and weather Bobby passes through. Using money he belatedly discovers he has inherited from his sister, Bobby eventually changes his identity (like the protagonist in Antonioni’s The Passenger) and escapes the USA. A former racecar driver, Bobby ultimately steers his jalopy-like life, but neither he nor the reader solves the mystery of the passenger. I realize this is something of a spoiler or, maybe, a reverse spoiler, but you should know what you would be getting into if you chose to ride along with McCarthy’s plot: not a detective novel but a defective novel, one that has reasons for not meeting conventional expectations of solutions.

Alternating with the Bobby plot are chapters dramatizing Alicia’s hallucinations in which the freakish and flamboyantly verbal Thalidomide Kid argues with her, tries to entertain her with a gang of other grotesques, and perhaps attempts to save her from herself. In this last, the Kid may be an inverted version of Alicia’s older brother who is more mature (or morally conventional) than her. And even more speculatively, the Kid with his performers may be a stand-in for the novelist who invents Bobby’s stories and companions.

Some background emerges from the opacities: The Westerns are the children of a physicist who helped fabricate (I see now) the atomic bomb. Bobby gave up mathematics and turned to physics at CalTech because his younger sister was more of a math genius who enrolled at the University of Chicago at thirteen. Bobby and Alicia also were passionately in love, but Bobby turned down Alicia’s incestuous seduction. Eight years after her death, he is still grieving, possibly regretting his refusal, and is existing in a state of functioning despair until he discovers the corpse is missing from the plane. Precisely why Alicia killed herself is also missing.

Then there’s the mystery of the text itself, why it is composed the way it is. Perhaps meant to balance Bobby’s usually low-key realistic chapters, the melodramatic and stylized hallucinatory chapters go on much longer than the reader needs to arrive at a plausible solution to the mystery of Alicia. Even Bobby’s realistic, sometimes banal dialogues contain performative set pieces in which his louche friends speak at unlikely length about their unusual experiences. The addict/criminal among them even expends considerable verbal energy analyzing Bobby who is voluble only about the physicists who made the atomic bomb possible.

Given the novel’s artifices, The Passenger resembles those modernist works mentioned earlier--fabricated by McCarthy from the subjects and styles of earlier, mostly American dead writers (the highly literary riffs by Long John Steepan sound Joycean). The canny carny voice of the Thalidomide Kid is Burroughs who had several “Kids” in his fiction. Bobby’s conversations with a trans woman have the charm of Fitzgerald. Much of the dialogue—its short sentences, its concern with mechanical processes—could be Hemingway. The deep sea diving recalls Melville. Miller is mentioned when men discuss, as they often do, food and wine. Bobby’s diver friend Oiler sounds like Michael Herr on Viet Nam. The Westerns’ incestuous desire, as other reviewers have noted, resembles the attraction of Quentin and Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury.

A couple of live novelists furnish analogues if not materials. Think of the failed detective Oedipa in Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 or the various failed quests in the physics-influenced encyclopedia of paranoia Gravity’s Rainbow. A lawyer’s rant to Bobby about the Kennedy assassination could be an outtake from DeLillo’s Libra, and the Everest-level discussions of mathematics in both The Passenger and Stella Maris resemble the talk in DeLillo’s novel about a prodigy and the history of mathematics, Ratner’s Star.

Hearing voices is a sign of mental illness. What’s an octogenarian novelist doing with so many voices, most of them from corpses? In this novel very much about inheritance all the way back to the origins of language, McCarthy is suggesting, I think, that any contemporary life or death can be represented and partially understood and partially misunderstood only through the frames of inherited, undead fabrications. Before the current interest in intersexuality there was Modernist intertextuality that McCarthy seems to be working in The Passenger before the pantextuality of postmodernism exploded around the time in which the novel is set.

If the deepest diving scientific basis of McCarthy’s obsessing over the Heisenberg uncertainties of fabrication is found in Bobby’s and Alicia’s long discourses on Godelian “incompleteness” and on physicists’ competing theories of sub-atomic reality, then the prime literary mover of The Passenger is Poe: the man who married his 13-year-old cousin who died at 25 (after Poe said the death of a beautiful woman was “the most poetical topic in the world”). Poe was a double dealer: he “invented” the detective story with its sure solution and also created insoluble stories about madmen. The Passenger could be the fall of the house of Western, an appropriation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” with its whiff of incest and collapse into darkness. Long before the atomic-age Westerns believed in some vague coming apocalypse, Poe relied on the science of his day to assert in Eureka that the world and the universe would end with entropic ingathering.

Early in his career, McCarthy was called a Gothic writer. Now at the end of his career, McCarthy, under the sign of Poe, spot welds many of the writers who have influenced American culture (if not him) to represent the uncertainty of all fabrications and interpretations. Including, I realize, this meta-literary reading of The Passenger.

The project of The Passenger fascinates me, but some, if not full, disclosure: for forty years I taught these writers to university students. McCarthy might say, “You don’t need to have studied the history of fiction to know that what seem to be realistic talk and ordinary thinking are hallucinations, just different in degree from Alicia’s and from the artifices in the novel.” Near the novel’s end, Bobby also hallucinates about the Kid, so I think Bobby would agree with--and his more intelligent sister in Stella Maris would insist on--the pessimistic statement I’ve put in the author’s mouth.

The Passenger contains many excellent descriptions of mechanical processes (diving, working an off-shore oil rig, driving a Maserati), numerous witty dialogues, learned scientific name-dropping, and some possibly profound formulations, but nihilism saturates the novel, implying that we all are passengers with little knowledge about our past and large delusions about our future which, according to Alicia, is demonic darkness visible. Seeking understanding of Alicia’s death, Bobby goes to Stella Maris and talks to a patient who knew her. The man asks, “What sort of despair would drive a person to the looney bin to query the mad as to their views?” I guess that might be taken as a warning to the reader who considers reading The Passenger and Stella Maris.

Living by the Mediterranean where western civilization (but not the Western family) began, Bobby concludes that “All of history is a rehearsal for its own extinction.” And yet, and yet, at the very end of the novel--as Bobby lives alone and simply, watches water, and observes fauna--another writer comes to mind: Thoreau at Walden Pond. In his dark room in his darkling plain world, Bobby writes “in his little black book by the light of the oil lamp.” Perhaps he has fabricated The Passenger, half remembered his life. Maybe even less than half imagined Alicia’s in Stella Maris.

But we don’t need The Passenger to be a recovery narrative by its middle-aged protagonist. Doesn’t the fact that McCarthy in his old age fabricated this informed and inventive and courageous and comprehensive representation of human failures--of action and comprehension and narrative--give us, if not hope, then solace? In Absalom, Absalom!, that grandest American novel about failure, a Faulkner character says, “all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it.” Dare to read McCarthy’s runic scratches. As Melville’s Ishmael says of a “boggy, soggy, squitchy” painting of whales, there was “a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant.”

After giving reviewers and readers a month to attempt to “find out what” The Passenger meant, McCarthy published Stella Maris. Only about half the length of The Passenger, this further fabrication is composed wholly of transcripts of Alicia’s interviews with her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen. Alicia has been in Stella Maris twice before. Now she has checked herself in at twenty because, she says, she has no other place to go, not since leaving her beloved Bobby in a coma in Italy after his racing accident.

Readers who expect Stella Maris to solve the mystery of Alicia will find her a recalcitrant patient who refuses medication, evades many of Dr. Cohen’s questions (particularly those about Bobby), sometimes fabulates, both condescends to the doctor and flirts with him, and loves to talk mathematics though not do it. But the book does fill in some blanks of her biography. When Alicia was four, an ophthalmologist told her parents there was something wrong with her head. At ten she had a vision she has never forgotten: “there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me.” At thirteen, the hallucinations began. At fourteen, Alicia admits near the book’s end, she asked Bobby to marry her.

A reader of The Passenger may have plausibly judged that Alicia’s parents contributed to her mental illness, but she denies it. Her mother died when Alicia was twelve. Her father was responsible for the deaths of thousands and was rarely around. But no, Alicia tells Dr. Cohen, it was her failure to achieve a breakthrough in mathematics that drove her crazy. Like the reader, Dr. Cohen is left to interpret an interpreter.

When asked if she believes in an afterlife, Alicia offers a response she says mathematicians employ in difficult decisions: judging if “the probability is not zero.” But this somewhat stereotypical math prodigy—a madwoman in the attic of her own mind--has made a very fundamental error in calculation. When she left Bobby in a coma, she assumed the probability of his recovery was that fatal zero. At Stella Maris, Alicia doesn’t know she is wrong, but the reader of The Passenger does. If Alicia walks away from the asylum and hangs herself because she doesn’t want to live in a world without Bobby, Alicia compounds her error all the way to zero.

Our inquisitive representative in the novel, Dr. Cohen, asks all the interpretative questions we might have asked—and then some. But he reaches no conclusions, not at least in these transcripts. He is more than professionally concerned about Alicia and makes it clear to her that he talks with her to keep her alive. Language fails, he fails. Perhaps not because he has neglected to ask the right questions or to give the right answers to Alicia’s questions of him, but because, to put it crudely, Alicia’s wiring was defective from birth. If true, then Stella Maris somewhat undercuts the value of recognizing fabrications that The Passenger implies--and McCarthy is imposing in this companion novel an even more pessimistic view of human existence than in The Passenger. Bobby recovered from his brain injury, but there is no recovery from Alicia’s—as the current euphemism goes—alternative cognitive processing. An ancient word may apply to her: fate. Or even worse, according to Alicia: chance.

Will readers recover from their disappointment that the clinically constrained Stella Maris offers few of the ventriloquizing and traveloguing pleasures of The Passenger while refusing to indubitably resolve the mystery of Alicia’s suicide? Hopeful readers may believe that McCarthy will add yet another fiction to these two, perhaps one that traces the missing passenger into the present when he becomes a cryptocurrency king or neuroscience savant who will definitively diagnose Alicia. Pragmatic readers may gladly accept that the two novels create an endless strange loop, twisted like a Mobius strip. Desperate readers will imagine that McCarthy will leave a final explanation and interpretation of the two books in his will.

Me, I’m inclined to invoke a theological doctrine that McCarthy may have been taught in his Catholic high school. The Jesuits told me about “invincible ignorance” which excuses those who have not heard about Jesus Christ from believing in him. For McCarthy, all humans are invincibly ignorant of the most foundational components of their existence including, crucially, their subconscious. All we have are fabrications, the most ruinous of which, according to Alicia, is the “parasitic system” that took over humans and their subconscious images: language. The rest is silence.

Tom LeClair is the fabricator of, most recently, Passing Again, a hybrid memoir, novel, and photobook—the last of his five-volume “Passing” series.